Julia Child is encouraging business to help reshape
Americans' attitudes toward what they eat and drink.

Julia Child says she has written her last cookbook. That's
not because she has worn out her welcome. Her seventh book, The Way To Cook
(Knopf), published in October, is headed toward sales of 300,000 copies or
more--an extraordinary figure for a lavishly produced book bearing a list
price of $50. The book's sales surprise even its author: "It seems
amazing to me that a $50 book will trot out of the bookstores that way."

Neither is Child daunted by the physical demands that a cookbook
places on a conscientious author, who must, after all, test every recipe
thoroughly. She turned 77 last Aug. 15, and she fractured a hip last year in
a fall at her second home, in Santa Barbara, Calif. (She tripped over a
computer cord: "I was plunging around, and I caught my foot in it and
lost my balance.") But from all appearances, in a conversation at her
publisher's office in New York, she is little changed from the vigorous
woman who, a quarter of a century ago, wrestled sullen cuts of meat and
unruly poultry into submission on public television's first successful
cooking show, "The French Chef."

The big problem she has with writing cookbooks, she says, is that
"it's so confining. I haven't been able to do one other
thing."

Child does have other things on her mind. Through her books and
television shows, she has encouraged countless Americans to make profound
changes in the ways they cook, eat, and think about food, but she knows that
influence of that kind is inevitably limited. No writer of cookbooks can hope
for the kind of immorality that other authors covet; the greatest names of
the past, like Careme and Escoffier, are more read about than read.

Will her own books be read a century from now? "Oh, no, I
don't think so; things changes so much. We don't know what new
ovens will be like. Maybe the microwave will turn out to be better."
Already, the earliest of her books, the two volumes of Mastering the Art of
French Cooking, published in 1961 and 1970, have been revised to take into
account the food processor.

While her books and TV shows have been highly successful, she
hopes to leave a lasting mark with a new venture that is drawing increasing
support from business--the American Institute of Wine and Food. Along with
wine producer Robert Mondavi and a handful of other people, she founded the
AIWF eight years ago to, in the words of one of the institute's
publications, "advance the understanding, appreciation, and quality of
wine and food."

The institute, based in San Francisco, has drawn the support of a
small but impressively diversified list of companies--including food
producers, wineries, retailers--and trade groups. Among them are the American
Dairy Association, the Seagram Classics Wine Co., the Carnation Co., and the
Quaker Oats Co. It will win more industry support, Child thinks, as
membership grows: "We haven't gotten all the people in the industry
who should be part of it. I think they're generally interested, but with
only 5,000 members, we really haven't had the impact that we want. We
need a much stronger organization; we should have 20,000 or 30,000 members by
now."

Early in November, the AIWF held its seventh annual international
conference on gastronomy, or good eating, in Chicago, with speakers and
panelists devoting themselves to such imposing topics as Mid-western ethnic
food traditions and the industrialization of American food production. But in
between the speeches and the panels there was food. The conference meals were
prepared by chefs from such renowned restaurants as Le Bernardin in New York
and Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.

Like its co-founder, the AIWF mixes a sober scrutiny of food with
unabashed delight in what Julia Child often calls "the pleasures of the
table." Some of AIWF's business supporters find this combination
refreshing. Says Tom McDermott, a vice president of the National Live Stock
& Meat Board: "When we sit down to a meal with others, it's
psychological, it's social, we do it for nutrition, for pleasure--all
sorts of things come into play. The institute, more than any other
organization I can think of, recognizes that."

Many Americans have always had trouble with the idea that food can
be enjoyed even if you take it seriously. Enjoying food has seemed a pastime
for the gluttonous and the frivolous--fast-food fatties and yuppie
restaurant-hoppers --whereas taking food seriously has meant swallowing it
like medicine. Many people have compromised by eating what is put in front of
them but not paying much attention to it.

Child, by contrast, speaks of enjoying food and taking it
seriously as if they were not simply compatible but indistinguishable:
"I'm disturbed at this terrible fear of food that's going on
in this country. You should enjoy every mouthful. People are nutty; they
should take themselves and their food seriously."

Her books and TV shows have, like the AIWF, embodied that
attitude. She peeled away the mystery from French cooking techniques, making
them accessible for the first time to millions of people, and she plunged
into food preparation with infectious gusto. "It's fun," she
says of food, and her consistent message has been that the more carefully you
prepare meals and the greater your awareness of what you are eating, the more
fun food becomes.

Child came late to her distinctive convictions about food. When
she was growing up as Julia McWilliams, in Pasadena, Calif., "food was
not really discussed. My mother came from New England, my father from
Illinois, and we had all of this very good, simple, sensible American food.
We didn't drink wine; one didn't, in the '20s. I really
didn't get into cooking at all."

She did have an occasional brush with an exotic cuisine. Her
family owned a rice farm at DeWitt, Ark., and she remembers eating squirrel
on a visit there ("It was delicious"). But otherwise she bumped
along in a culinary rut, all the way through Smith College, then in a job
writing promotional copy for a New York furniture company, and finally during
a wartime stint with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington,
D.C., where she cooked on a hot plate atop her refrigerator.

She wound up in Ceylon, filing papers for the OSS, and there she
met Paul Child, an official in the agency, 10 years her senior, and, while no
cook himself, a connoisseur of fine cooking. "I didn't really get
interested in food until I met Paul," she says.

Paul and Julia worked together with the OSS in China,
too--"we got terribly much interested in Chinese food"--and in 1945
they married, both for the first time, after returning to the U.S.

Before she married, Julia briefly attended a cooking school in Los
Angeles, and "I learned how to make baking-powder biscuits and pancakes.
Paul said he married me in spite of my terrible cooking. When we got married,
I did a lot of cooking, using The Joy of Cooking and Gourmet. It was fun, but
I didn't know much; and I realized, when I got to France, I didn't
know anything."

Paul Child's work as a member of the Foreign Service took him
to the U.S. Embassy in Paris. Julia had been casting about for a career since
her days as a publicity writer--"I wanted to get into The New Yorker, as
everyone did in those days"--but not until she tasted what French cooks
made did she know what that career would be. She was impressed by "the
seriousness with which they took their craft, and that it didn't make
any difference how long it took, as long as it was beautifully done. That
really appealed to me very much. I just fell into that; it was what I had
been looking for all my life."

She studied at the famous Cordon Bleu in Paris, and then she and
two French friends started their own cooking school. The three collaborated
on the book that eventually turned out to be the first volume of Mastering
the Art of French Cooking. The publisher that had originally contracted for
the book turned it down--twice--and Knopf finally picked it up, somewhat
grudgingly.

Around the time the book was published, Paul retired from the
Foreign Service, and the Childs settled in Cambridge, Mass. Julia appeared on
the local public-TV station, WGBH, to plug her book, and that led in the
summer of 1962 to three experimental half-hour cooking shows. On the first
show, Julia has written, "there was this woman tossing French omelettes,
splashing eggs about the place, brandishing big knives, panting heavily as
she careened about the stove."

Those trial episodes led in early 1963 to a series that eventually
ran for more than 200 episodes. Audiences--first in Boston and then around
the country--found her unpretentious manner winning. Her shows had a
spontaneous air, because for the most part Julia "let the gaffes lie
where they fell." She chose, as she later wrote, to "have things
happen as they naturally do, such as mousse refusing to leave the mold, the
potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One
of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and
bear with it if you cannot."

"The French Chef" was followed by three series of
hour-long shows, six how-to videotapes, more cookbooks, and the kind of
nationwide celebrity that no other cookbook author has ever enjoyed.
Propelled by her TV exposure, sales of her first six cookbooks soared; Knopf
will say only that sales have been in "the millions of copies."

Her books and television shows have rewarded her handsomely -- at
anything like normal royalty rates, she will earn $1 million or so from her
new book alone--but Child has shied away from opportunities to earn many more
dollars.

"I have to pay quite a bit for my clothes, because I'm
outsized," she says--she tops 6 feet--"and as long as I can get
clothes, and have a decent car, I'm not really interested in the money
end of it."

She has rejected a great many proposals that she lend her name to
this or that product. She doesn't take such endorsements
seriously--"I think you must realize that all you're being is
window dressing"--but beyond that, "if you endorse it, then
you're wedded to it. Suppose they change the product? Your name is still
attached to it. Once your name is on something, that means you stand by it. I
think it's too risky."

Although she still makes occasional appearances on ABC's
"Good Morning America," she never seriously considered moving her
cooking shows to the more lucrative world of commercial TV, because "I
always felt that we might be bossed around. I like public television, because
I can do what I want. I hate to admit it, but I'd be perfectly happy to
do it for nothing. It's a great deal of fun."

At one point she did give her television work a more formal
business shape--she set up Julia Child Productions when she was making her
later TV shows and the videotapes--but that company is dormant now that her
TV work has slacked off. Mostly, she says, she makes do with the help of an
accountant and a part-time secretary.

As for other avenues, a restaurant with Julia Child's name on
it could not help but be wildly popular, but she never considered going into
that business: "I know too much about it. It's a total life. Unless
you had your husband or your wife in it, it would be very difficult. The
hours are just so different."

For all the success she has achieved in a business sense, Child
sees herself as an educator, more than anything else; she dubbed her fourth
book, From Julia Child's Kitchen, "a private cooking school."
She has made some concessions to fashion in The Way To Cook, her new book, by
scaling back the butter and cream in some recipes, but she remains steadfast
in her devotion to French cooking, which is, after all, a pedagogue's
delight--as she says, "it's the cuisine with all the rules. What
you need are the basic techniques, and then you can interpret them as you
wish."

(Among all the rest of the world's cuisines, she has found
only one other, she says, that really appeals to her: "I'm very,
very fond of northern, Peking-style Chinese cooking. That's my second
favorite. It's more related to the French; it's more
structured.")

It is education, through the American Institute of Wine and Food
and other avenues, that absorbs her attention now. Already, she says, the
food profession in the U.S. is attracting "very well educated
people," and she hopes that food preparation--traditionally a subject
for trade schools--will find its way into university curricula. "What
I'm very much interested in is eventually being able to have some
universities that will have a degree in the fine-arts slant of
gastronomy," just like a degree in theater, architecture, or dance.

Gastronomy, she says without a trace of doubt, "is really
more important than any of them."